Microfinance

Most of this list is the vocabulary of a lender with nothing to seize: die Gruppenhaftung, die Wochenrate, der Folgekredit. The word for the loan itself carries an older arrangement inside it. Das Kleinstdarlehen ends in das Darlehen, and that noun was put together from dar, an old adverb meaning there or forth that survives in darreichen and darbieten, and das Lehen, the medieval fief: usually land that a lord handed to a vassal to hold and work but never to own. Das Lehen in turn comes from leihen, to lend. So the German word has always said what the English one leaves open: the thing handed over still belongs to someone else and is expected back. The fief is long gone, and nobody hearing Darlehen today thinks of a castle; but the idea of holding something on somebody else’s terms is exactly what a borrower with a weekly instalment lives with.